---

This book examines the notion of the pursuit of meaning in Julian Barnes´s three consecutive novels: Flaubert´s Parrot (1984), Staring at the Sun (1986) and A History of the World in 10 Chapters (1989). The first chapter situates Barnes´s novels in the context of the discourses of postmodernism. The focus of Chapter Two is a search for the consolations and reassurances of religion in Staring at the Sun. Chapter Three explores the pursuit of meaning through art as enacted in Flaubert´s Parrot and flags the contending approaches to art that are confronted in the text. The last chapter is devoted to "Parenthesis," the half-chapter of A History of the World in 10 Chapters, and considers love´s capacity to transcend the entropy and relativity of the disillusioned world of postmodernity.

---

Wojciech Drag is a lecturer at the University of Wroclaw. He received an MA from the University of Glamorgan and a PhD from the University of Wroclaw. He is the author of Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (2014). Drag´s academic interests focus on experimental literature and contemporary British fiction.

---